C.3. Recommended Partitioning Scheme

For new users, personal Debian boxes, home systems, and other
single-user setups, a single / partition (plus
swap) is probably the easiest, simplest way to go. However, if your
partition is larger than around 6GB, choose ext3 as your partition
type. Ext2 partitions need periodic file system integrity checking,
and this can cause delays during booting when the partition is large.

For multi-user systems or systems with lots of disk space, it's best
to put /usr, /var,
/tmp, and /home each on
their own partitions separate from the /
partition.

You might need a separate /usr/local partition if
you plan to install many programs that are not part of the Debian
distribution. If your machine will be a mail server, you might need
to make /var/mail a separate partition. Often,
putting /tmp on its own partition, for instance
20–50MB, is a good idea. If you are setting up a server with lots
of user accounts, it's generally good to have a separate, large
/home partition. In general, the partitioning
situation varies from computer to computer depending on its uses.

For very complex systems, you should see the
Multi Disk HOWTO. This contains in-depth information, mostly
of interest to ISPs and people setting up servers.

With respect to the issue of swap partition size, there are many
views. One rule of thumb which works well is to use as much swap as
you have system memory. It also shouldn't be smaller than 16MB, in
most cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. If you
are trying to solve 10000 simultaneous equations on a machine with
256MB of memory, you may need a gigabyte (or more) of swap.

On some 32-bit architectures (m68k and PowerPC), the
maximum size of a swap partition is 2GB. That should be enough for
nearly any installation. However, if your swap requirements are this
high, you should probably try to spread the swap across different
disks (also called “spindles”) and, if possible, different SCSI or
IDE channels. The kernel will balance swap usage between multiple
swap partitions, giving better performance.

As an example, an older home machine might have 32MB of RAM and a
1.7GB IDE drive on /dev/hda. There might be a
500MB partition for another operating system on
/dev/hda1, a 32MB swap partition on
/dev/hda3 and about 1.2GB on
/dev/hda2 as the Linux partition.